Perhaps ironically for a novel about a reclusive artist, All the World’s Mornings is probably Pascal Quignard’s most famous book, adapted, as it was, into as film the same year it was published, and quickly translated into English by James Kirkup in the days when a French film could engender a paperback release with a still on the cover. This is my first experience of Quignard but, judging from the titles of his other novels (Sex and Terror, anyone?) it seems typical in that it fearlessly broaches grand themes such as love, death and art without blinking.
The novel is set in seventeenth century France and based on the life of a historical figure, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, a musician who is credited with adding a seventh string to the viola. (The English version comes with a series of historical foot-notes, with no indication they are not in the original). The novel begins with the death of Saint Colombe’s wife, a loss he never recovers from:
“Three years after her death, her image was still before him. After five years, her voice was still whispering in his ears.”
(His wife will return to him throughout the novel, a ghost or a memory). After her death he cuts himself off from the world, teaching his two daughters, Madeleine and Toinette, (and the occasional pupil) the viol:
“Year after year he laboured at the viol and became an acknowledged master. In the two years following his wife’s passing he worked up to fifteen hours a day.”
He has a hut built in the grounds of his house so that he can play isolated and undisturbed. When he is invited to play for the king he refuses, saying that “his palace is no place for a wild man of the woods.” (Caignet, sent to request his presence, becomes the first of many to listen secretly as he plays in his hut). When asked again, we glimpse his ferocious temper as he smashes a chair while declaring to the abbe Mathieu:
“Your palace is smaller than any hut, and your public is less than nobody.”
The purpose of music, and therefore art in general, is foregrounded again with the arrival of another visitor, Marin Marais, a young man who wishes to become a pupil of Sainte Colombe. Sainte Colombe listens to him play but initially declines to teach him:
“You are just making music, Monsieur. You are not a musician.”
When he does agree to take him on as a pupil he says it is because his “broken voice moved me” (as a child Marais had sung in the King’s choir). It’s not long, however, before their relationship breaks down, Sainte Colombe, in what is clearly something of a habit, smashing Marais’ viol against the stone fireplace when he hears he has played for the king:
“Monsieur, what is an instrument? An instrument is not music. You have there in that purse enough to buy yourself a circus horse to pirouette before the king.”
The story has plenty of drama – on the same day Marais leaves he begins a relationship with Madeleine which he must now pursue in secret, just as he continues to listen to Sainte Colombe’s music in secret beneath his hut. Yet, for all the passion which will be unleashed, the novel remains, at heart, the story of Marais’ relationship with music. Quignard has done something remarkable in creating a historical novel with pace and plot enough for the big screen while at the same time providing a profound meditation on art. The novel’s short chapters and formal style add to the sense of reflection.
All the World’s Mornings is a short, powerful novel which you are unlikely to leave without being provoked into consideration of artistic creation. Sainte Colombe, and presumably Quignard, a vocation of almost religious proportions:
“When I draw my bow across the strings, it is a little bit of my living heart I am tearing out. What I do is nothing but the discipline of a life in which there is never a day off. I am fulfilling my destiny.”
Quignard has been widely translated recently (with particular thanks to Seagull Books), but All the World’s Mornings is currently out of print, a situation which an enterprising publisher should rectify as a matter of urgency.
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